Film Review: The Fabulous Baker Boys

The Fabulous Baker Boys, written and directed by Steve Kloves, is my favorite movie. The right word is "favorite," and not "best," or "greatest," or any other grandly hyperbolic adjective. While the movie has its fans, and it was favorably reviewed upon its release, it doesn't enjoy any significant critical or popular stature. One cannot really argue the film deserves renewed attention, either. It didn't break any new ground. It's pastiche. But The Fabulous Baker Boys is my favorite movie for a very simple reason. It embodies what I love in films more than any other picture.

The title characters are two brothers, Jack (Jeff Bridges) and Frank (Beau Bridges), who work as a freelance lounge piano duo in Seattle. Faced with a declining number of gigs, they decide to take on a singer. After a farcical series of auditions, they hire Susie Diamond (Michelle Pfeiffer), the only applicant with talent. She's brusque and willful, and while she brings the act its greatest success, she also ends up tearing it apart. She and Jack have an affair, and it inflames the tensions that have developed between the brothers over the years. She brings Jack, the more talented musician of the two, face to face with his bitterness at playing beneath his ambitions. Frank's perennial aggravation over keeping Jack disciplined enough to maintain the act boils over. The Baker Boys finally break up, but it's obvious that Susie was only the catalyst. The brothers were in denial about things that had been percolating for quite some time. Kloves' story isn't melodrama. Everything flows from the characters, not a predetermined plot structure. While all the conflicts end up more or less resolved, there's no big climactic scene. The characters' relationships just find a new normal.

The film pushes so many personal buttons. The loosely constructed, character-driven approach to story has its appeal, and Jack's frustration at not having the opportunities his talent has equipped him for certainly has resonance. The music is my favorite kind: the jazz and jazz-inflected pop of the 1950s and '60s. (Jack's piano performances were dubbed by Dave Grusin, who appears to have modeled the style after that of jazz great Bill Evans.) Steve Kloves has a knack for the kind of cynical, quippy dialogue that was a highlight of '30s and '40s Hollywood, and he includes it throughout. (The grittier word choices aren't sidestepped, either.) He's also enamored with the dreamy moodiness of noir-style visuals, and the film is suffused with the glamorous melancholy of French films from the '30s through the early '60s. Kloves has the chops to pull all of this off, and his nostalgic sensibilities are bound up in a very 1980s perspective on content and form: money, for better and for worse, is a defining life feature, and the sleeker the presentation, the better. For someone who grew up in the '80s, who sees that contemporary take on things as the norm, and who also adores those older styles, the synthesis this movie provides seems ideal. And to top things off, there are the performances Kloves gets from his three leads.

Jeff and Beau Bridges, brothers in real life, are ideally cast as Jack and Frank. It's no surprise they can evoke the pair's rapport, with all its affection and tensions, and make it look effortless. They make things between the two so vivid that one may wonder how much of the film is an allegory for their real-life relationship. Beyond that, Jeff Bridges does full justice to Jack's moody disaffection, and he makes the character's emotional remoteness romantic. Beau Bridges' major achievement is in making Frank's fussbudget tendencies comic, but never making him a clown. The performance is layered enough to make one respect Frank's anxieties even while laughing at him. The two actors are always entertaining together, and the characters' partial reconciliation near the end--an impromptu duet of "You're Sixteen"--is one of the film's highlights.

Michelle Pfeiffer is thrilling. In the years leading up to this film, she'd proven a versatile performer, with a direct, unfussy acting style that put no distance between her characters and the audience. As Susie Diamond, she broke through to a new level of assurance, and it's electrifying. The biting insolence of Susie's manner echoes the Lauren Bacall of To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, but Pfeiffer's work is far richer. Her line readings have the crackling tautness of Bacall's best, but there's a level of nuance that gives a much fuller sense of the personality underneath. Pfeiffer also makes Susie a marvelously compelling singer. She knows how to style a song, and she makes the lyrics flush with emotion without ever seeming mushy. Her performances of "More Than You Know," "Ten Cents a Dance," and "My Funny Valentine" are all terrific, and she even manages to redeem "Feelings." The high point--and the film's signature set piece--is Susie's rendition of "Making Whoopee," which she sings atop Jack's piano while the two are performing in front of a New Year's Eve audience. Steve Kloves and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus give the scene a swooning visual quality--Susie's blazing red dress framed by the room's darkness as the camera slowly dollies around the piano. Pfeiffer's singing always flirts with the audience, and here that's extended to Jack in full view of the people watching. It's so brazen it's hilarious, and the happiness Pfeiffer shows also makes it romantic and sweet. This undeniably great scene is the finest moment of her career.

All the artisan work in the movie seems perfect: Michael Ballhaus' gorgeous cinematography; the elegant rhythms of William Steinkamp's editing; Dave Grusin's musical arrangements; the acting in supporting roles from Jennifer Tilly, Xander Berkeley, and the rest of the cast. Everything comes together, and every time I see the film I always find more to admire. Thinking it all over makes me want to see the picture again. What can I say? It's my favorite movie.

Short Take: Casualties of War

Like many filmmakers of his generation, Brian De Palma regards the literate, visually splendid historical dramas of David Lean as an artistic pinnacle. Casualties of War, his one effort in this mode, is an extraordinary film. It matches Lean’s visual grandeur and thematic intelligence, and outdoes him in terms of dramatic intensity. The script, by David Rabe, is based on the Vietnam War’s Hill 192 incident, which occurred in 1966. A squad of U. S. soldiers kidnapped a South Vietnamese woman while on a reconnaissance mission. Four of the five men took turns raping her, and near the end of the mission, she was murdered. The soldier who refused to participate (played by Michael J. Fox) sought to report the crime, but his efforts were frustrated by his commanding officers. Finally, after a chaplain intervened, the four other soldiers were charged and court-martialed. Employing a virtuoso level of filmmaking craft, De Palma dramatizes an environment where this kind of atrocity is perhaps inevitable. The young men have been thrust into circumstances in which they can be killed at any moment, and often cannot tell the difference between the enemy and those they are defending. Their only source of hope is their youthful bravado, but the experience of war will always rub their noses in a sense of helplessness. Bravado may curdle into macho posturing, and occasionally into a predatory need to assert dominance over others without any consideration for right and wrong. War can be a test of moral strength, and the picture takes one right to the heart of the crucible the victimization of the woman represents. In the film's most devastating moments, a viewer is seared with the misery of knowing that despite a refusal to do wrong, it may also be impossible to do right. Michael J. Fox is ideal as the story’s hero. His knack for audience rapport could not be stronger, and his talent for verbal double takes, masterfully used in his comic roles, is equally effective in conveying the character’s horror. His small stature is a particular advantage in this role. A viewer is acutely conscious of the character’s vulnerability to go-along-to-get-along bullying, and it makes his ability to stand his moral ground all the more impressive. Sean Penn, who plays the squad leader, is erratic. He’s terrific in the film’s first act. One feels the character’s capacity for heroism, and Penn powerfully takes the viewer inside the moment he is broken. It’s a quiet scene of the character shaving, and his eerie, dead-looking eyes let one know he’s on the edge of madness. It’s one of the finest moments Penn has ever played. But Penn falters in the other two acts. There’s no tension in the angry, theatrical bluster he affects, and he’s repellent as both character and actor. The film has other flaws, including a misconceived framing sequence set after the war, and an award-bait speech Fox’s character delivers at the start of the third act. But despite these, it is one of the finest war dramas ever made, and a high point of Brian De Palma’s career. The cast also includes Thuy Thu Le, John Leguizamo, John C. Reilly, Don Harvey, Sam Robards, Ving Rhames, and Dale Dye. The elegant cinematography is by Stephen H. Burum. Ennio Morricone provided the haunting score. David Rabe based the script on the account of the Hill 192 incident by journalist Daniel Lang, first published as an article in The New Yorker.

Short Take: Do the Right Thing

Do the Right Thing, written and directed by Spike Lee, is one of the most ambitious films of the 1980s. It is also one of the most accomplished. The story is set on a block in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. It's a punishingly hot Saturday in August. Lee, working in an impressionistic slice-of-life mode, follows the comings-and-goings of a multitude of characters from that morning until early the next day. He entertainingly renders the friendly sides of their relationships, but he also captures the tensions between them, which come to the fore as ego battles of varying degree. The conflicts frequently have a racial dimension. The Italian-Americans who own and operate a pizzeria, the Korean-Americans who run a corner store, the white yuppie who recently bought a local brownstone--all become a target of hostility from African-Americans in the neighborhood, and they often give as good as they get. Most of the confrontations are minor: they briefly swell and then recede, and everyone goes about their business. But that night, one of these petty stand-offs escalates into violence. When it ends, there are only losers: a man is dead, and a business has been destroyed. Lee, with remarkable artistry, dramatizes the subtlety with which racial hostility can pervade everyday life, and how the violence it occasionally inspires can seem to erupt out of nowhere. The film is startlingly incisive, and one may find oneself mulling it over for some time after the closing credits roll. The acting ensemble--Lee himself, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Giancarlo Esposito, Samuel L. Jackson, Bill Nunn, Rosie Perez, John Savage, John Turturro, and others--is outstanding. Ernest Dickerson's cinematography powerfully captures the sweltering summer atmosphere. Bill Lee, the director's father, contributed the fine jazz score.